Gardening – Lee Reich

IT’S A HARD, HARD WORLD

May 6, 2026/0 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

The following is adapted from my book, The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Lot Better Garden, available from the usual outlets or, signed, from me (www.leereich.com/books).

Coddled Beginnings

Imagine that you hadn’t set foot outside all spring… better yet, that you had spent all spring in a warmed cave . . . then tomorrow you went out and stayed there. At the very least, you would have to put your hands to your eyes for a while to shield them from the sun. And if the night was very cool — not unusual this time of year — well, you would shiver. Fresh air and sunlight are great for the constitution, but you would have to first acclimate yourself to them.

The same goes, even more so, for vegetable and flower transplants. Indoors, where they get their start, they are, after all, coddled. Read more

FAMILY MATTERS

April 29, 2026/0 Comments/in Gardening, Pests, Planning/by Lee Reich

The following is adapted from my book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden:

No Idle Gossip

You often hear talk about various plants being related to each other. There’s the sunny-faced members of the Daisy Family, for example, and the Pea Family, all with pods. Cole crops, such as cabbage, broccoli, and kale, are close kin, all in the same genus and species. What characteristics link these groups of plants as relatives?

Yes, goldenrod is in the Daisy Family!

Before you blurt out that all daisies have petal-rimmed flowers typified by sunflower and aster, picture the flowers of goldenrod, also a member of this family. And although all cole crops have waxy, bluish green leaves, just look how the plants vary in form. We eat the stalk of kohlrabi, the leaves of cabbage, and the flower buds of broccoli. Read more

PLANT SMALL, THINK BIG

April 16, 2026/3 Comments/in Gardening, Planning/by Lee Reich

Chillax

If delayed gratification sometimes seems to be too much a part of gardening, it does teach us to appreciate the means to an end as much as the end itself. Especially with planting trees. Your vision might call for a towering maple or spreading beech in a corner of your front yard, but you can do no more than plant one, care for it, and wait.

Not that full-sized trees cannot be — and sometimes are — moved for instant effect. Read more

THE POWER OF TOUCH

April 8, 2026/2 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Too Tall and Too Thin

I hope that I’ve caught you in time, before your seedlings have stretched out too long and too thin. That’s a problem this time of year. Tomato, zinnia, and broccoli plants — they’re all growing up on sunny windowsills. It’s the combination of a bit too much warmth and a bit too little light that causes that stretching.

The easiest way around this problem would be to just wait until the weather warmed up enough to sow seeds directly outside. There, abundant sunlight, cooler temperatures, and buffeting by wind would make sturdy, stocky seedlings. Of course, do this and you won’t eat your first broccoli bud until the end of June, and you’ll have to wait until early September to admire your first zinnia flower or bite into your first tomato. Read more

TRAVELING PLANTS

March 18, 2026/0 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Yes, Plants Can Travel Successfully

People often stare at me in disbelief if I suggest buying a certain plant from a nursery 2000 or 3000 miles away. Surely no plant could survive such a journey!

Not so. This time of year, UPS trucks and airplane holds are filled with plants on the move.

I prefer to buy my plants at local nurseries. But when I want a specific plant, such as a Hudson’s Golden Gem apple tree on G.11 dwarfing rootstock, I have to turn to mail order. (In this case, it would be from www.cumminsnursery.com.)

If shipped from reputable nurseries, mail-order plants thrive as Read more

Hedges need repeated shearing with hedge shears each season

TEN ESSENTIAL PRUNING TIPS

March 11, 2026/2 Comments/in Gardening, Tools/by Lee Reich

Do It Now (or Soon, Usually)

An ideal time to prune most trees and shrubs is just as their buds are swelling, which is just about now here on my farmden. Leafless stems make it easy to see where to cut, dead stems make their presence known, and with coldest weather past chances for cold damage near cuts are minimized. Warmer spring weather also promotes rapid healing of cuts.

Whole books have been written about pruning (I even wrote one!: THE PRUNING BOOK), yet the essence of pruning can be distilled into a few general pointers. The ten listed below will not result in an expert pruning job, but offer sufficient guidance to keep you and your plants reasonably happy.

1. Don’t cut unless you have a clear reason to do so. Trees and shrubs vary in their needs for pruning, from, for example, Japanese maple and witch hazel, which need no regular pruning, to butterfly bush and lilac, which need to be pruned every year to look their best.

Japanese maple’s rarely need pruning

ALL FOR A SLICE OF PIE

January 22, 2026/5 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening/by Lee Reich

The Real Thing

This time of year, a slice of Key lime pie is the next best thing to walking along a beach in the Florida Keys. Okay, not the next best thing, but good eating anyway. Hold on a minute, though, before beginning your gustatory journey; the supermarket is not the place to begin.

What you are most likely to get at any market is a Persian lime (Citrus × latifolia), a hybrid of Key lime and lemon), and this kind of lime lacks the unique and potent aroma of a genuine Key lime (Citrus × aurantiifolia). Persian lime is more cold-hardy and less seedy than Key lime, and has a longer shelf life. Even commercial lime pies are sometimes made with Persian limes, one reason why a pie from a bakery or a slice in a restaurant might miss the mark in flavor.

Bonsai Key lime tree

You probably now suspect — and rightly so — that I’m going to suggest that you grow your own Key limes. Do it, but watch out Read more

UGLY WORD, NICE PLANTS

December 29, 2025/4 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

What’s a Variety

Mmmmm, how I like to bite into a cultivar. And look at the beautiful petals of a cultivar. And admire the autumn foliage of a cultivar.

A “cultivar?” What an ugly word for a plant with so many qualities.

Actually, a cultivar is any cultivated variety of plant. Get it? “Cultivated variety” contracts to “cultivar,” a word that was originally conjured about 100 yers ago, then codified in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) in 1959. Some horticulturalists, myself included, avoid the word. As I wrote, the word is just too ugly.

Brassica oleraceae var. botrytis, B. oleraceae var. gemmifera (with Homo sapiens), and B. oleraceae var. acephala.

Before the word “cultivar” was invented, gardeners used the word “variety,” but some people objected Read more

GIFTS FOR GARDENERS

December 17, 2025/6 Comments/in Gardening/by Lee Reich

Duh…A Plant, But What Plant?

December is a low point in the gardening year, but a high point in the year for giving gifts. A felicitous way to raise that gardening low point is with a gardening gift. What might be a good gift for a gardener?

Most obvious would be a plant. After four decades of growing and buying plants, I, for one, still get a thrill when opening a box with a new — for me — plant in it.

Staghorn fern

Still, there are ho-hum plants, plants that have their qualities but just aren’t going to elicit any surges of excitement from me. Read more

STUFFED

November 24, 2025/2 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Grow Your Own Stuffing

Thanksgiving is a time of year when one’s thoughts naturally turn to . . . stuffing. No, not stuffing yourself, but stuffing a turkey. Even many people who choose not to eat turkey on Thanksgiving nonetheless do enjoy stuffing themselves with stuffing.

So why not think about what ingredients for stuffing can be reaped from the garden? Even better, how about setting aside a little portion of the garden next year as a stuffing garden?

The bread and butter of any stuffing is some starchy food, often bread and butter itself, the bread usually as crumbs. There’s no breadcrumb plant, so forget about growing breadcrumbs. Not that you couldn’t buy some wheat “berries” at a health food store, plant them next spring, harvest the grain when the plants dry down, thresh and winnow out the berries, grind them into flour, make the flour into bread, then let the bread go stale and pound it into bread crumbs.

Growing breadcrumbs– I did it once!